Just before the first Material Matters opened in New York, I sat down with its founder, Amy Abrams, who also runs Artists & Fleas and Manhattan Vintage, to talk about building a home show for the “home curious.” She tells the story of the round Crate & Barrel table that showed up two weeks after her wedding and has since become vintage itself. Then, on my own, I walk through three approaches to shopping a vintage show: something specific, something general, and serendipity. I cover the running list I keep on my phone, the luggage trunk I wish I’d passed on, my thing for ceramic birds, and the questions I ask myself to tell serendipity from an impulse buy.

Material Matters returns November 7–8 in NYC’s Flatiron District. https://materialmatters.world/

In this episode, I talk with Canadian interior designer Philip Mitchell, author of Collected Interiors: Rooms That Tell a Story. Our subject is how to mix antiques, contemporary art, and pieces from different eras and cultures so that a room feels magazine-worthy and still personal and lived in.

Philip loves too many things to commit to one style, and his rooms show it. There's no single "Philip Mitchell look." What makes his mix work is what I call disciplined maximalism. You don't limit the number of styles you love; you limit the number of pieces you put out at any given time. With fewer objects and breathing room around them, the eye can take everything in without the distraction of clutter. That's when you start to notice the contrast, juxtaposition and tension between pieces, which is what makes a collected room feel alive. As I said in our conversation, maximalism can mean maximum impact, not maximum stuff.

We take apart one entryway from his book (pages 18–19, in the gallery below) to see this in action. We also talk about his childhood in a layered English-country home and why so many polished rooms feel like stage sets. Philip shares how he helps clients who can't say what they love, and how couples with very different tastes end up with a home neither would have made alone.

In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Nadia Watts, an interior designer based in Colorado who works with clients across the country, to look through a selection of her portfolio. Most of our time is spent in one home: the house of an architect and avid collector, filled with salvage-yard finds, family heirlooms, old-world antiques, and contemporary art. We also visit two more projects, and we talk about Nadia's heritage as a descendant of Louis Comfort Tiffany and her Gem Collection of fabrics with Kravet.

What I kept noticing across Nadia's work is something I'm calling every piece in conversation. It's the idea that a mixed room feels deliberate when each object is in conversation with something else in the room. Sometimes that conversation is agreement: two pieces share a color, a finish, a material, or an era. Sometimes it's a friendly debate: two opposites set each other off, and each becomes more itself. The pieces don't have to match. They have to answer each other. That's what separates a mix that feels collected from one that just feels busy, and it's one of the most useful tools I know for mastering the mix at home.

The slide deck from this episode is available below. Browse the portfolio images alongside the takeaways, or watch the full episode as a subscriber.

In this episode, I sit down with Sophie von Oertzen Williamson — an interior and textile designer, author of The Art of the Clash, now based in Connecticut — to look through a curated selection of her book. It started out being about pattern and color and ended up being about something bigger: why there's no formula for mastering the mix, only an eye you earn over time.

Sophie is 42, and she's the first to say that at 28, she didn't have the aesthetic she has today — not because she lacked talent, but because she hadn't lived those years yet. Her eye was built the same way her homes were: from Switzerland, where she was born, to Hamburg, to boarding school in the UK, to Singapore, to Shaker Heights, Ohio, to Connecticut now. Every one of those places shows up in her rooms — not as a theme, but as a record of an eye that's still being trained.

This episode walks through her book, photo by photo, with Sophie explaining her reasoning for each one — and none of the reasoning repeats. That's really the point: mastering the mix isn't a checklist you apply everywhere. It's a case-by-case judgment call, made by someone who's been making those calls for decades. The photos referenced throughout are available in the gallery on this page.

Lauren Hidalgo built Awarehouse because she got tired of the same thing you probably have: searching for something well-made online and drowning in listings you can't trust. Her marketplace works with a limited number of vendors — real people, real small businesses, willing to tell you exactly where something came from and how it was made.

In this conversation, we go through four specific pieces from her shop. A $195 throw blanket, made to order on one of the last textile mills left in the country. A soy candle shaped like a 3D topographic map of Yellowstone, from a Colorado maker who'll tell you exactly what's not in it — no lead, no synthetic fragrance. A hand-painted ceramic vase Lauren brought back from a small factory in southern Spain. And a cutting board with a story behind the wood, a juice groove, and a company that answers your email in a day. We talk about what each one actually costs to make, why the price is the price, and what it means to spend money on something you'll never need to replace. By the end, I think you'll never look at a $25 throw pillow the same way again — not because it's a bad purchase, but because of what it's quietly standing in for.

I tour the Dallas home of Aubrey Butcher, co-founder — with her husband Kale — of the tile and stone company Riad Tile, and come away with an idea I'm calling the volume control panel: the sense that every room has a dial for what gets noticed first, and most decorating advice only teaches you how to turn it down.

Aubrey works both ends of it. Throughout her home, she takes what designers call the envelope of a room — the ceiling, floor, and walls — along with the large pieces of furniture, and pushes those elements toward quiet: a sectional sofa painted the exact same color as the wall behind it, built-in cabinets painted to disappear into the walls around them, drapery hung with the hardware hidden so panels fall straight from the ceiling with nothing to interrupt the line. Then, because she and Kale spend their careers sourcing tile and stone from quarries and factories around the world, she uses that same material to turn the volume back up exactly where she wants it — dramatic marble at the fireplace, the kitchen backsplash, and the bar; a striped tile pattern that runs floor to wall in the laundry room.

This episode is a full room-by-room tour of that home, plus a conversation about how one overpriced bathroom tile led Aubrey and Kale to Morocco, a shipping container, and eventually Riad Tile — and a plain-language walkthrough of how to actually choose between stone, ceramic, porcelain, zellige, cement, and terrazzo tile.

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Myquillyn Smith — known to many as The Cozy Minimalist and author of the new book House Hushing — to talk about what actually tells you when you have too much stuff in a room.

Myquillyn's method is called backwards decluttering: instead of picking up every object and asking whether it sparks joy, you clear a room down to its furniture and function, live in it stripped-down for a day or two, and only let things back in once you've proven — by missing them — that they belong. It's decluttering by experience rather than by interrogation, and it works because a room that already feels good gives you the confidence to let more go.

Partway through our conversation, I named something I'm calling the Ten-Minute Threshold. Myquillyn's approach trusts the gut — how does this room feel — and I think that instinct is exactly right. But I also think there's a concrete, measurable way to check that gut feeling: if a room takes you more than about ten minutes to reset back to a state that feels good, you own too much for that space. Not too much by any universal standard — too much for you. It's not a rule about quantity. It's a diagnostic for friction.

In this companion episode, I share my takeaways from touring the home of Amy Dutton, an interior designer based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, whose 1920s bungalow she and her husband gutted and rebuilt while raising three kids. What I found there is what I'm calling the whole Slow Style framework in one bungalow — a single house where all three of my design principles and all five of my design elements show up at once, without ever being assembled off a checklist.

This isn't a home tour episode. It's a reflection on why Amy's home works — architecturally, emotionally, and aesthetically — and what any listener can take from it, regardless of their own home's size, age, or style. A separate bonus video episode, the full room-by-room home tour with Amy, is available for paying subscribers.

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Ali Milam, managing director of Porta Romana — a family-founded English lighting and furniture house based in the English countryside, known for handcrafted work across casting, forging, ceramics, glassblowing, and its own in-house painting studio — to collect the origin stories behind some of their most striking pieces.

Nearly every object in Porta Romana's collection traces back to a specific, often unexpected moment: a museum exhibit, a garden, a dog walk, a bag of mussels bought for dinner. This episode moves through several of those stories in detail, including exactly how a wall light shaped like a cluster of mussel shells came to be cast from real mussels, one shell at a time.

This episode also covers Porta Romana's collaboration with fashion-influenced artist Gergei Erdei and its recent B Corp certification.

This episode starts with a paint color and ends up somewhere I didn't expect — a whole chain of handmade decisions moving through my office, my bedroom, and beyond. Curtains made from a friend's Spoonflower pattern pulled straight from a vintage French fabric I'd been hoarding. A pleated lampshade with no sewing involved. A tall, unloved dresser was swapped for an antique cupboard I found after two weeks of watching Facebook Marketplace. A vanity skirted the way Debbie Matthews taught me. A stool recovered with a pair of vintage embroidered place mats I didn't even know I'd use until I needed them.

By the end, I landed on the thing I actually believe about handmade: it was never a purchase category to begin with. It's a relationship — with the person who made something, with where you found it, with the version of yourself who made it imperfectly and kept going anyway.

I sit down with Danielle Postel-Vinay — a New York Times book columnist and, under the name Danielle Trussoni, an award-winning novelist — to talk about her book Home Sweet Maison: The French Art of Making a Home. Danielle spent five years living in France, married into a French family, and studied French domestic life from the inside.

This episode is about what I'm calling home as a vessel for your vision of life. It's a reframe of an idea I talk about often — that your home is a visual autobiography — pushed a step further. A visual autobiography can tip inward, into something self-focused. A vessel for your vision of life is outward-facing: a home built to carry what you value and offer it, on purpose, to the people who enter it. Danielle's book and our conversation are full of examples of what that looks like in practice, room by room.

We cover the French entrée (entryway), the salon, the salle à manger (dining room), the boudoir, and the daily ritual of the six o'clock apéro — and what each of those spaces reveals about a culture that treats a home as a deliberate offering rather than a passive backdrop.

My conversation with Los Angeles designer Kim Gordon is about setting an intention before you design anything at all. Kim asks a house what it wants to be before she draws a single floor plan, and she treats the senses — not the color palette — as the true starting point of a room.

This episode comes from our archives and therefore it's the full length version.  The podcast is on break for two weeks.  Subscribe to hear all of the new full length episodes! 

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Julia Collins, the London-based founder of the art advisory Collins and Green, to talk about how to actually look at a painting — no art history degree required.

Julia has real academic art credentials: courses at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a master's degree from Christie's. But when she walks a client — or me — through a painting, she almost never starts there. Instead she names the one detail that actually caught her: a color balance, a blank face, a mysterious jug in a still life. This is what I'm calling how to look at art — the practice of noticing your own reaction to a piece before reaching for technicality, provenance, or price, and staying with that reaction long enough to ask why it's there.

This episode is a room-by-room, painting-by-painting walk through Julia's own collection — mostly 20th-century French and Scandinavian work — and a demonstration of a method anyone can use, whether you're standing in a major museum or your own hallway.

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Maida Korte — a Chicago-area interior designer and the author of the new memoir Gutted: How an Old House Remodeled Me — to talk about what happens when a renovation refuses to move at your pace, and what it costs (and gives back) to finally let it.

Maida set out to write a practical book about renovating a hundred-year-old house in Woodstock, Illinois. What she discovered while writing it is what I’m calling here loosening: the process of giving up the need to control the outcome — on the house, and eventually on everything else. Maida had spent her career as a designer running a tight ship, getting things done on schedule. The house wouldn’t allow it. And letting go of that grip, she says, is what actually made her a better wife, mother, and friend.

This episode covers the full arc: the compromise that got a self-described city girl to leave Chicago, the string of disasters that came with an aging house, the room that became the heart of the home, and the moment an artisan said something about the house that made her realize the book had never really been about the house at all.

In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Debbie Mathews, an interior designer and antiques dealer based in Nashville, Tennessee, to look through a curated selection of her portfolio — from a sunroom in the Belle Meade neighborhood to a working ranch outside Franklin, Tennessee, to a mountain house living room with 30-foot ceilings. What this episode makes visible is something I'm calling the space between the ask and the answer: the ordinary, specific problem a client hands a designer — a room that goes unused, a space that feels too formal, an object nobody wants to see — and the beautiful, considered decisions a designer makes to answer it.

This isn't a portrait of an unusual designer or unusual clients. Debbie's clients are typical: they know a few basics about what they want — a color, a piece of furniture they already love — and rely on her aesthetic judgment for everything else. That's a completely normal client relationship. What makes this episode useful is how clearly you can watch it happen, room after room, with the specific decisions named out loud.

In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Liz Williams — an interior designer based in Atlanta, Georgia, known for her work with symmetry, elegance, and what I've started calling the last decision — to look through a curated selection of her portfolio. We move through a grand formal home on the Chattahoochee River, a barn conversion in Madison, Georgia, a show house primary bedroom in a high-rise, and several other projects, stopping at the details that most rooms never get and most homeowners talk themselves out of.

The last decision is the finishing detail: the trim on the pillow gusset, the tape on the curtain hem, the nail head tracing the curve of a wingback chair. Not the focal point, not the statement piece — the thing that comes after all of those, when a room is almost done but not quite complete. Liz takes this step in every room she designs, across every style and scale. And once you see it, you understand immediately what most rooms are missing.

The slide deck from this episode is available below — browse the portfolio images alongside the takeaways, or watch the full episode as a subscriber.

In this guest interview episode, I sit down with Danielle Nicholson — interior designer and author of the renovation planning guide Don’t Start Without Me — to talk about the single most preventable cause of renovation regret: starting before you’ve done the thinking.

Danielle has spent 18 years watching clients arrive at renovation projects underprepared — not because they lacked taste or budget, but because they skipped the step that makes everything else work. The vision before the visit: the quiet, intentional thinking about how you actually want to live in a space, done before the contractor is called, before the showroom appointments are made, before a single finish is selected.

This episode covers the full scope of what that preparation looks like: how to think about function before aesthetics, how to renovate in stages without losing coherence, how to work with contractors and designers without handing over your vision, and why the pressure to “just get it done” is the enemy of every renovation outcome worth having.

In this Designers at Home episode, I tour the home of Jill Litner Kaplan, a Boston-area interior designer whose approach to decorating stopped me in my tracks — not because it's flashy or maximalist, but because of a single idea I couldn't stop thinking about after I left.

Walking through Jill's home, I kept noticing the objects and their stories long before I noticed anything else. The antique Buddha in the entryway, draped in jewels she added herself. The stingray shagreen dining table beneath a 1930s Sputnik chandelier. The hot pink cut velvet sofa her mother found after years of searching. And only somewhere in the middle of the living room did I realize: there is a lot of pink in here.

The color was there the whole time. The stories just got there first.

This is what I'm calling color as emergent from story — the idea that in the most compelling homes, color isn't a strategy you apply. It's a consequence of collecting objects that mean something. When you choose things because they move you, the palette takes care of itself. And the result feels more cohesive, not less, because it's rooted in something true.

This episode is a full home tour with Jill — room by room, object by object — and a masterclass in what visual storytelling actually looks like in a home.

What does a 2007 issue of Domino have in common with a room you'd design today? More than you'd think.

In this episode, I dig through a stack of old design magazines — Domino, Flea Market Style, House Beautiful, Veranda, and Country Living, spanning 2007 to 2019 — and ask the question I find myself returning to constantly: what still holds up?

We talk suzanis, suzanis (yes, still), the case for painting all four walls instead of just one, why the humble breakfast nook deserves a comeback, and what the best white kitchens actually have in common. I share my ongoing plinth hunt, make a confession about Country Living being my Bible in the late '90s, and make a gentle but firm plea for the death of the accent wall.

If you've got a pile of old tear sheets, a half-finished vignette, or a dining room that could use some bookshelves — this one's for you.

In this episode:

• What Domino got right about sustainability back in 2007

• Minimalism vs. maximalism — and why neither is ever really "out"

• The case for the jewel box room (powder rooms, butler's pantries, and going all out in small spaces)

• Layered window treatments, bed canopies, and other things that keep coming back around

• Why I think the accent wall's days are numbered

• Treating your kitchen and bathroom like actual rooms